


Lady Lazarus

by Crossley



Series: Kink Meme Saturday [1]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Discussion of Abortion, Existential Angst, F/M, Infertility, Post-Destroy Fic, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pregnancy, Prompt Fic, References to Past Sexual Assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-29 22:44:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1010996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crossley/pseuds/Crossley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Shepard’s ledgers run red, blood soaking into every page. She’s a killer, and at some distant point, she made peace with that. The idea of </i>addition<i> instead of </i>subtraction<i> is novel. That maybe, just once, Commander Shepard </i>created<i> instead of </i>destroyed<i>.</i></p>
<p>Or, "Shepard was pregnant on the beam run" fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lady Lazarus

**Author's Note:**

> Original Prompt for my Kink Meme Saturday event was "pregnant Shenko lovemaking." No, I don't know how the fuck I got from that to this, either. I fail so hard at Babies Ever After it's not even funny.
> 
> Uses the Shepard from _[Born Free](http://archiveofourown.org/works/830114)_ and my tumblr's "our lady of bad behavior/a biotic and a shipwreck walk into a beacon" tags; minor details may not make sense without context from those.

1.

She's sitting on a Citadel public toilet staring at the pregnancy test she just stole from an asari drugstore. (In a paperless world theft's the best way to stay off the grid.) Tactical cloak's engaged. The galaxy's on fire and she just failed seventh-grade sex education.

Now _there's_ an endorsement that'll go viral: _I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favorite stall to cry in on the Citadel_.

  
2.

It wasn't supposed to happen this way.

It wasn't supposed to happen at _all_. Maria had vague ideas about children sandwiched between her big dreams about making it off her shitty backwater colony. _All_ wrapped into the fucked-up priorities of a girl who used to imagine tragedy befalling her family, something just terrible enough to make her interesting and mysterious instead of another colony rube.

Then Maria was nothing but tragedy, and Shepard walked away instead.

Four surgeries and nine implants and still nothing worked as it should. She gritted her teeth through the pain during boot camp and every deployment, a visceral reminder that Maria wasn't really dead, that it _hadn't_ happened to some other girl, that Shepard carried with her a gut full of old ghosts and broken dreams.

So Shepard did what she did best: scorched the ground and salted the earth.

She took her meager savings and used her first extended shore leave to have everything ripped out. The Alliance wouldn't do it, and Shepard didn't want it on their records anyway. Leaving evidence of weakness wasn't her way.

Fuck _dreams_. Shepard had a vision.

Two months after the surgery she received her acceptance to the villa.

  
3.

Huerta's not an option; someone will sell her out. It has to be Chakwas.

She paces across her cabin, Kaidan off working on Spectre reports and— _fuck_ , she'll have to tell him. Tell him about the copper in her mouth and throwing up after Thessia and Jacob Taylor's shining eyes as he said _we're_ _having a baby._ About the horrible epiphany that crashed down on her with those words. About the fact that what had been done, Cerberus had undone. A deed that cost them nothing, gained them nothing, and still managed to change everything.

Or maybe not. They never got around to the children conversation before Alchera.

  
4.

Precisely four weeks after waking up on Lazarus Station, Shepard burst into Miranda Lawson's room, her eyes coal-black. "I'm bleeding," she’d snarled at Miranda, fists shaking with fury.

"Put some medi-gel on it," Miranda advised, primly typing at her terminal even as her lips were wafer-thin.

"Not like _that_."

Miranda paused, placed her hands in her lap, and swiveled to face Shepard. " _Ah_."

"Yeah. _Ah_." Shepard stormed across the room. "What the _fuck_ , Miranda?"

"There's this wonderful new invention called the 'tampon'—"

"You fucking know what I mean. I haven't had a normal period since—" Shepard didn't finish that sentence, and for once, Miranda didn't take the perfect opening. "You told me you brought me back exactly as I was. So _why_. Why _this_." She gestured, uselessly, to her abdomen.

Miranda had been solemn as she’d stared Shepard dead in the eye. "Because Commander Shepard doesn't need scars to remind her who she is."

That was the day Shepard realized: Miranda Lawson _understood_ her.

  
5.

"Seven weeks," Chakwas confirms with a grim expression.

The night they went to Apollo's, most likely. Kaidan admitted to her that night his birth control had lapsed, and Shepard had assured him they were safe.

"I confess I've wondered why you never came to me," Chakwas says, arms crossed. "Kaidan shouldn't have put it off that long, but you both had a responsibility."

"I went to Huerta," Shepard admits, a touch abashed now. She’d walked out of Kaidan’s hospital room, him still banged up and bruised but staring at her with all that hope in his eyes, and it made Shepard brave, brave enough to stop at the reception desk and schedule an appointment with a gynecologist.

“Your Cerberus implants would’ve begun filtering out the synthetic hormones used in standard implants almost immediately. If you had just asked...” Chakwas sighs, shaking her head. Rueful now, not chastising. But going to Chakwas would've been too raw. Too much of an admission. Hope might spring eternal, but back then hers had been fragile as a newbo—

—oh, _fuck_ that metaphor.

Chakwas, with that way of hers, seems to understand. "We'll be landing on Mahavid in six hours," she says. "Can you make it through the mission?"

"Don't I always, Doc?"

The good doctor's face pinches. "I'll make the preparations. And Commander—I'm sorry."

Everyone's always fucking sorry.

  
6.

_Let’s make sure we never let time slip by us like that, okay?_

She skips the appointment. Chakwas shoots her dirty looks in the mess, her jaw granite. Kaidan asks questions and Shepard makes up answers.

Shepard sleeps without nightmares for the first time in weeks.

  
7.

_(Miranda sometimes called her_ Lady Lazarus _. It was, and is, a far more apt metaphor than Lazarus of Bethany could ever be: Shepard, rising out of the ash, reborn in an Alliance cruiser’s med bay, on a Cerberus station.)_

  
8.

They're puzzling through Garneau's laboratory when EDI asks, "Are you reconsidering your decision?"

Shepard whirls around, aghast. "Am I—how do you—wait, how long have you known?"

"Since the hormone shift in your urine matched known markers for human pregnancy."

Shepard's mouth drops open. "You analyze our urine? You know what, don't answer that."

EDI shrugs, her movements dainty. "There is no need for me to answer. Based on my statement, you have already derived the correct conclusion."

Shepard bangs her head on the nearest wall.

"Is that a form of hormone-induced behavior?"

  
9.

She puts off a second appointment as they pull Ann Bryson from the Leviathan's clutches. Chakwas is losing patience. The phrase "shit or get off the pot" is never more hilarious (or terrifying) than in a proper British accent.

They're close now. To Leviathan, to the end. It'll be all or nothing in the next few weeks.

She has to make a decision.

Shepard's tired. She falls into Kaidan's arms at night, too exhausted for the voices of the dead to seep into her dreams. Food has a taste again, even if that taste is cardboard.

They're so damn _close_.

"Talk to me, EDI," Shepard says into the empty cabin. Easier, somehow, to talk to the disembodied voice than the shiny metal shell that's rapidly becoming inhabited.

"About what, Shepard?"

"Tell me why I'm making the right decision."

EDI's silent for a long time. Then she says, slow and oddly uncertain, "initial DNA scans indicate an XY chromosome. Additional genetic markers indicate a marked resemblance to Major Alenko."

"He'll look like Kaidan," Shepard translates, unbidden. Right after Apollo's, they'd flown to Omega to help Aria T'Loak recapture her throne. Nearly a week trudging on that rock, days in the mines. She swallows, the implications sending her head spinning again. "Will he be a biotic?"

"Unknown. Eezo nodules are undetectable during the first trimester. Studies on children of biotics, particularly biotic fathers, are limited. Genetic profiles indicate a high chance of developing biotic ability if exposure took place."

She sighs and wells down her nausea; it doesn't go down as easily as it used to. "None of this is what I—"

_Isn't it?_

Shepard's ledgers run red, blood soaking into every page. She's a killer, and at some distant point, she made peace with that. The idea of _addition_ instead of _subtraction_ is novel. That maybe, just once, Commander Shepard _created_ instead of _destroyed_.

That could also be the hormones talking. (Never underestimate the power of chemicals.)

"Cancel my appointment with Chakwas," Shepard tells EDI, "and don't schedule another."

"Shepard—"

"I'll need to realign my shields," Shepard says, cutting her off. "Talk to me about prenatal injection compounds."

This isn't deciding, it’s deferring. She knows that. There will be plenty of time when this is over for them to talk it out, but here, now, Shepard discovers she’s lost her taste for sacrifice.

  
10.

On the shuttle ride back from Despoina she dozes on Kaidan's shoulder.

She doesn't tell him. Doesn't tell anyone, though Javik shoots her suspicious glances. It would change her squad's behavior. Every organic species alters their behavior to protect new life, even for aliens. EDI shows her studies. Shepard can't have them hesitating to follow her orders or making needless sacrifices.

And of course, there's a chance one or both of them won't make it.

So it's her secret. Figuring out how she's gonna get them both out of this alive is her problem and no one else's.

  
11.

After Horizon, Miranda and Shepard meet in Port Obs.

"I never thanked you for bringing me back," Shepard says. She knows Miranda's decisions were rationalizations. Accurate ones, but rationalizations nonetheless. "All of me."

The light of understanding dawns slowly, but when Miranda looks at her, her ocean-blue eyes are water. "Shepard—"

"Don't say it out loud," Shepard says, but it doesn't stop Miranda from hooking her arms around Shepard and pulling her into an embrace.

It's the first, perhaps only, time Shepard believes she's doing the right thing.

  
12.

As Cronos Station looms she begins to plan. She’ll need an exit strategy, a way to extract them both. A way to make it clear that when this is over, Shepard lives her life on her terms and her terms alone.

One of these days the galaxy has to take care of itself.

Before boarding the shuttle to London, Shepard tosses her dogtags on the desk. They’ll be her ticket out, or a memento he can carry in the lonely years to come. (She’s no longer the naïve girl who thought if she died, he would carry on as if she’d never been.)

  
13.

"I can't lose you again," Kaidan whispers, broken notes cracking in her ear.

  
14.

Over a QEC, Miranda tells her to _do it again_. Rise from the ash, one last time.

Shepard makes no promises, but her hand touches her abdomen as if by reflex.

  
15.

Liara touches her mind to Shepard’s and pulls back, aghast.

"Not a word, Liara," Shepard warns her in a hard voice. "Not a fucking word."

Her eyes brim with tears as Shepard bypasses her for the last squad selection she’ll ever make.

  
16.

If she lives as long as an asari Shepard will never forget the look on Kaidan's face as she turned away from the Normandy and towards the beam.

She knows, with sinking certainty, he never would've stayed aboard if he'd known. Knows it as she knows that one loss would devastate him, two would be a killing blow.

So sue her. She'd like to get her kid's father out of this alive.

  
17.

Miranda Lawson built Commander Shepard to last.

Lacerations, six broken bones, bruises everywhere, but nothing a few medi-gel shunts won’t fix up.

A salarian excavation team finds her first and hauls her to a makeshift Citadel medical tent, her anonymity keeping her from the exclusive care at a real hospital. The doctors call her Jane Doe, as per human custom. (More right than they know.) She’s notoriously camera-shy and aliens can’t tell the difference between humans anyway. They’re suspicious when they see all the Cerberus cybernetic work, but she tells them she’s a defector. No one questions her once the rest of the tests come back.

Pregnant women get a pass on everything.

_He_ ’s alive, despite every reason not to be. _They_ ’re alive, though the Normandy’s missing and presumed destroyed in the final blast.

Tough little son of a bitch. In the end, _he_ makes the decision for himself.

She leaves in the middle of the night cycle, taking the first shuttle down to Earth.

  
18.

She spends the next few months in the San Joaquin Valley, organizing farm laborers and scanning encrypted Alliance channels. They set her up with an old Volkov at the compound wall, sparing a chair when her legs begin to protest long hours standing. The farmers assume she’s just another war widow, and if she bears an uncanny resemblance to certain missing saviors, well, cognitive dissonance and the Alliance’s nasty habit of lightening her skin in promotional materials keep their suspicions from being voiced.

In the afternoons, she takes naps. At night, she dreams of the Normandy crashing on barren slopes, of synthetic-cleansing fires, and tells herself it’s no more than she deserves.

They ask her name. She tells them it’s Maria Contreras.

At nineteen weeks, the baby kicks for the second first time and Shepard scribbles a message across channels: _do not think I underestimate your great concern_.

Miranda appears two weeks later, impeccable as ever with an Alliance logo on her bolero jacket. “A lot of people have been looking for you, Lady Lazarus.”

Shepard rests a hand on her belly; the swell’s just beginning to show. “Let them look.”

Her lips twist, whether with amusement or disdain Shepard can’t read. “So what’s your plan? Do you have a doctor lined up? Is there a hospital nearby? Any idea where you’re going to live? You can’t hide forever on this compound.”

She stares out into the fields, questions she hasn’t allowed herself to think about spinning through her mind. Planning seems wrong, somehow; planning means she’s doing this alone (as if she’s making the decision today instead of three months ago). “I’ll figure something out,” she says.

Miranda smacks her forehead. “Please don’t tell me the savior of the galaxy’s entire birth plan involves _squatting in a cornfield_.”

Shepard shrugs, but she can’t suppress her smile.

  
19.

There is one advantage to revealing herself to Miranda that offsets the badgering: she can arrange a private QEC channel with a facility in Vancouver.

Kaidan’s mother is smaller than she would’ve expected, and young-looking despite gray streaks and lines settling into her fine features. Somehow, Shepard knows they’re new, the results of months of worry and grief leeching at her vitality. Still, her back is ramrod straight and her eyes suspiciously narrow. Just as Shepard would’ve expected her to be.

“Mrs. Alenko? I’m Maria Shepard.” From her crisp tone, no one would’ve known that Shepard agonized over how she’d introduce herself for the past two nights.

The source of this agony is not impressed. “So you do have a first name,” she remarks blandly, but with a hint of pique that’s so _Kaidan_ it makes Shepard’s chest ache.

“Wonder of wonders.” It’s dry, drier than Shepard intends.

There’s a long pause as Shepard screws her courage up. This is harder than she expected. Not charging-a-Reaper hard. Personal. Intimate.

“Do you know where my son is, Commander?”

“No,” Shepard admits, and she doesn’t bother to hide her sorrow at that. _I tried to save him_ won’t go very far with this hardened woman, a woman who cherished her miracle baby and never took his health for granted, who never quite forgave herself for Jump Zero.  “There’s something else.”

Shepard stands up, the QEC distorting to map the swell of her womb. “You’re going to be a grandmother.”

Mrs. Alenko is quiet, her face frozen into blank shock. When she speaks again, fury underscores her words. “You ran towards a Reaper while _carrying my grandchild_?”

Despite herself, Shepard smiles. That’s an anger born of love, and that, at least, they have in common.

  
20.

And that’s her life. Plan for a future she never expected; ignore the demons nipping at her heels. If her feet hurt, that’s the swelling.

One day an Alliance contingent appears, ostensibly to tour the grounds, but Hackett himself is leading the group. He spots her immediately, and Shepard watches him calculate. She, as unofficial leader of the compound, gives the tour, making it easy for him to maneuver them into a private room.

“I admit when Miranda Lawson told me you had your reasons,” Hackett says, “this isn’t what I expected.”

Shepard swallows, her hands curling into fists. She’s been preparing for this day, has the speech planned out, but it’s ashes on her tongue. “There’s only so much sacrifice a person can take,” she says finally, by way of explanation.

Hackett nods. “I assume congratulations to Major Alenko are in order?”

She turns away, forehead pressed to the window. “If you knew where to send them.”

“We do.”

Shepard twists back to face him, her body and her brain hopelessly out of sync. Hackett’s smiling. “The Normandy’s scheduled to land in Seattle eleven days from now. Everyone onboard survived. Well, except for the computer. EDI, you called her? She went quiet with the explosion.”

It’s not as if she’s surprised. She’d heard reports of the geth going quiet, their ships floating like flotsam through space, their units falling where they stood back on Rannoch. Somehow, though, she’d clung to stubborn, irrational hope.

“You wouldn’t know anything about what happened, would you Commander?” Hackett’s voice is deceptively casual, but Shepard knows he’s already thinking about her future debriefing. The world has questions, and she needs to be ready with answers.

EDI had been curious. Excited. Contemplated the idea of synthetic reproduction, if she and Joker could ever find a way to mesh their data and make a child of their own. If that was even something she wanted. EDI had helped, in her curious way.

She’d admitted that the idea made her want to alter her programming to prioritize new life. Shepard told her to keep her old programming.

No reason to think that _he_ ’d influenced her decision. Shepard hadn’t even been sure _he_ ’d survived. She’d been bleeding, barely moving. There was no reason to believe that tiny thump after the Catalyst’s final pronouncement had been _him_. She’d had her reasons. Wanted a galaxy that could make its own fate instead of being shaped by self-appointed deities. Wanted to let those countless dead nations finally rest. Wanted the sacrifices of those who had come before to be worth it.

_Was it worth it to Legion?_

She hadn’t chosen one organic over billions of synthetics. She wasn’t that selfish.

_Right?_

“Sorry sir,” Shepard replies. “Can’t remember anything.”

  
21.

They have a hero’s welcome prepared for the Normandy, and it feels _right_. Shepard couldn’t stand the idea she might have had taken her bow, accepted the galaxy’s accolades, without them next to her. (When the attacks begin, and they will begin, they will be for her alone to accede.) Thousands pack the street. Holo-displays of her crew everywhere. Shepard spots a young human girl wearing a toy Kuwashii visor, oriented horizontally, and a boy clutching a stuffed red krogan.

She’s cloaked as she slides through the crowds, though her agility’s already fraying thanks to her changing body. Still, she makes her way to the front, past two Alliance security checkpoints with nary a klaxon, ready for the big reveal.

Her heart’s in her throat as the ship touches down, as the airlock opens. James and Cortez are among the first, then the squad filtering in after them. The crowd’s roaring. Shepard stays cloaked and silent. She won’t believe until she sees.

Then he steps off, aged another five years (on top of the ten she’s given him since Eden Prime), face drawn and tilted away from the noise. She’s not sure if he has a migraine coming on or he’s just upset.

Her cloak wears off, and his eyes find her. Stares, uncomprehending. Drinks her in. Mouth open as understanding sinks into his brain.

She’s not sure who started running first but she meets him in the middle (where they always meet) and somehow despite her new bulk he lifts her up, kisses her just like the night above Cronos, her tears and his streaming into a single river.

  
22.

“It’s a boy,” she tells him once they’re alone.

He looks at _her_ ; for hours all he could see was the swell of her, novel and frightening for him, and his eyes are dark space. “Did you know?” he asks, swallowing. She can fill in the rest: _did you know about him when you ran for the beam? When you put me on the Normandy?_

“Yes.” A simple answer, free of weeks of agony, the doubts that had festered.

She could give him the litany, the justifications. Bad timing. Running the numbers. Eating and sleeping and the inexorable sense of sheltering a life that needed _you_ , and _only_ you, to make it out alive.

“Why didn’t you _tell_ me?” She hears their months separate in his voice, pain and fear streaking through them.

 “If you’d known,” Shepard asks, “would you have gotten on the Normandy?”

His eyes squeeze shut. They both know the answer.

Her fingers drift against her omni-tool straps, creeping up to activate the interface. The speech has been planned out for months. She knows it by heart. There was a time she never thought she’d have the chance to give it. Lately she’d had to revise it. Accessing it would be a security blanket, nothing more, and it’s long past time to be brave.

“I want you to make the choice you’re most comfortable with,” Shepard begins. “You can be as involved – or uninvolved – with his life as you want.” The unspoken implication hangs in the air. Kaidan always had a knack for reading between the lines. “I’m set for life, thanks to the whole saving-the-galaxy thing. I have a nine-figure offer for a book deal, I didn’t know publishing companies survived the Reaper invasion—”

“ _Shepard_.” Kaidan’s cutting her off the way she’s cut his rambling off so many times. The reversal’s strange, but the fire in his eyes is all the response she needs.

They don’t fit together the way they used to, Kaidan bending, Shepard angling her hips to accommodate the bulk between them. When they make it to the bed the first thing that crosses Shepard’s mind is relief; her feet are swollen.

Still, there’s heat between her legs, a fire she’s long sated with memories. Those nights vanish like vapor trails as Kaidan hands drift over her, exploring her changing topography, a body familiar and novel at once. He makes quick work of her tank top but lingers over her skin.

He pauses at the swell of her stomach, hand frozen in mid-air as if he’s thought better of touching. His shuttered expression tells her everything she needs to know.

“I’m not fragile,” she says. _We’ve survived a hell of a lot more than this_.

Kaidan’s palm feels _right_ , curving as if it always belonged there. A flutter beneath his hand is a sort of greeting, gentler than she’d expected. Shepard plans to give him a day before she tells him about the eezo nodules the doctors found, and his mother had some choice (and prophetic) comments about carrying a biotic.

“I just...” Kaidan chokes, pressing his ear to her. “I can’t believe it. We’re here. We made it. _All_ of us.”

  _Not all of us_. The words rise unbidden to Shepard’s lips but she doesn’t give them purchase. She won’t tell herself lies but there are things she will say.

She tells herself it was the right choice as Kaidan lips blaze hot trails over her belly and between her legs. Tells herself the galaxy deserved to emerge from the shadow of the Reapers as she positions herself on top of him, adjusting to accommodate her new figure. Tells herself it was the right choice, the _only_ choice, as he slides into her, filling her in a way that’s more right than she could have ever imagined.

As she shivers, pleasure like razors slicing through her, the demons are silent.

They’ll be back, she reminds herself as Kaidan cuddles close, whispering to her stomach. They never go away for long.

  
23.

She’s drained, eyes barely staying open, the past seventeen hours leeching every bit of energy. Kaidan wipes her brow and bites his lip every time she cusses him out. Miranda, pristine despite the stained medical scrubs, plops a ruddy bronze bundle into her arms, misshapen and dangerous and beautiful.

All these years, all these lives, all these deaths. She stands atop rubble made from bones and broken code. Death is all that cobbles them together. She’s Maria. She’s Shepard. She’s Lady Lazarus, rising from the ash. She was a savior and will be a mother, but not both. Never both.

Shepard gazes at her son and thinks _someday I will regret you_.

But not today.

**Author's Note:**

> _Out of the ash_   
> _I rise with my red hair_   
> _And I eat men like air._
> 
> —Sylvia Plath, _Lady Lazarus_


End file.
